About This Book
Your future self is a stranger to you—and that's why you keep making decisions they'll regret.
Hal Hershfield, a behavioral scientist whose research has shaped how psychologists and economists think about identity over time, argues that our brains treat our future selves much like they treat unknown people—with little empathy and less loyalty. Your Future Self draws on more than a decade of research to explain the mental errors that drive short-term thinking, from skipping savings to abandoning health goals, and offers practical methods for closing the gap between who you are now and who you want to become.
For anyone who has ever wondered why good intentions so rarely translate into lasting change, this is a rigorous, accessible look at the psychology of time and identity—one that reframes self-discipline not as a character trait but as a failure of imagination worth correcting.